“... binges carried out by willing accomplices – Sinclair Beiles, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso – brought order to the mass of nightmare scripts left in cupboards and drawers. Suitcases were abandoned when Burroughs flitted. Famous for his greyscale anonymity, Burroughs was the invisible man time-trapped in a thousand squid-soft ...”

“... referred to by Taylor as the Anasazi). Best of all, Peck loses his mind over a Blue Jay notebook that Lewis bought on a trip to Taos and Santa Fe with Cather in 1925, and in which the two women took turns writing. BLUE JAY, it proclaims on the cover, above a sprightly picture of the bird, and beneath that ...”

“... version of Gershwin’s ‘I Loves You, Porgy,’ released on her first 1958 album Little Girl Blue and in 1959 as her first hit single, in which she drills into the lyric to uncover a new seam of intimacy and anguish. ‘I love you … Porgy!’ she sings, her breathy voice cutting out the demotic ‘s’ of the song’s title, then taking a beat before ...”

“... may think we know more than we do. We think we know that ‘Ancient Britons’ painted themselves blue with woad, that Celtic paganism involved nude female dancing, and that human sacrifice was carried out by the ubiquitous druids. Pliny reported the naked woad-stained processions of British women ‘at certain sacred rites’, and Tacitus gave a dramatic ...”

“... kill her father. She was already damaged by at least one primal scene, having walked into ‘the blue room’ at the ranch one day, and seen her father fucking a strange woman. Fuzzy: ‘You don’t know anything. You’re insane.’ Around this time, Edie became anorexic, and attended exclusive schools; but she, too, went into Silver Hill in the autumn of ...”

“... occurs in an early poem which appears to be fretful about gratification. In her translation of St Gregory Nazianzen’s ‘Soul and Body’, she has the rhetorician pray for the right words, ones that ‘may flourish/Of which mine enemy would spoil me,/Using pleasurehood to foil me!’ But the poem’s own fondness for verbal flourishes isn’t easily ...”

“... they all were. Ginsberg arrived at Columbia wanting to be a labour lawyer who would fight for blue-collar rights, but under the influence of Burroughs and Lucien Carr he soon began to see himself as a poète maudit and Nietzschean transgressor. Burroughs handed out reading-lists that included Gide, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky and Lautrèamont, and introduced into ...”

“... the 1950s’. Highlight the ‘survivor’ bit. The last poet left standing in the saloon. (Think Gregory Peck in Henry King’s The Gunfighter. Grave moustache succumbing to gravity.) Many myths surround the man, among enthusiasts, cultists and close readers, and this has always been one of them: Raworth is unwell but never incapacitated. The moustache may ...”

“... was a third-generation arriviste. His grandfather, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Trollope’s Sir Gregory Hardlines, pushed his way from nothing to the top of the Civil Service, marrying Macaulay’s sister on the way. His father pushed his way into high politics, marrying a cotton fortune on the way. G.M. Trevelyan himself was pushed into the Mastership of ...”

“... and made at least one donation towards its running costs. But a memorandum prepared for Pope Gregory XIII in the early 1570s, very probably by Nicolo Ormanetto, one of Pole’s closest collaborators, reveals that Pole had had ideas of his own for an English college in Rome which would do for England what the Germanicum was to do for Germany. Ever since ...”

“... it before now.’ It was July and he was wearing a seersucker jacket, a rather punctured jumper, blue trousers that stopped short of his sneakers, a Panama hat, and he was holding onto a cane. ‘I apologise for the delinquent Edwardian look,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’Somewhere along the road, Karl became deeply fascinated by the satellite ...”

“... that the bluer the eyes the greater the capacity to withstand pain: ‘As the colour went through blue-grey, green, hazel, light brown and dark brown so the reaction to pain increased on the average.’ Similar prejudices permeated discussions of how much pain was felt by women as compared to men. Francis Galton argued that European women may seem more ...”

“... Ingrid Bergman, Simone Signoret, Jack Lemmon, Jim Morrison, Sharon Tate, Harrison Ford and Gregory Peck (‘boring as rain’). Demy had long wanted to make a Hollywood movie and Columbia Pictures fronted the money for Model Shop (1969), a desolate portrait of a directionless Angelino facing the Vietnam draft. It had a New Wave slackness superimposed ...”

“... the place keeping the planet from exploding. I remember a lecture about Vico, a lecture by Richard Gregory on the physiology of perception, for all the world as if a Pelican book had come to life, and a rather baffled aged British traveller to Eastern Parts, who talked with all the ease of his upbringing of ‘fuzzy wuzzies’ while I squeezed someone’s hand ...”

“... round the North Cape to Murmansk. Once we put on proper uniforms we’d long since given up for blue battle dress, except in Reykjavík, and were inspected by a baffled and rather cross admiral. After a year or so our discipline, such as it was, may be said to have faltered; Archer continued to dispense punishments, but less often and less severely. It was ...”